Information
Information is the resolution of uncertainty. Information is associated with data and knowledge, as data is meaningful information and represents the values attributed to parameters, knowledge signifies understanding of an abstract or concrete concept; the existence of information can be uncoupled from an observer, which refers to that which accesses information to discern that which it specifies. In the case of knowledge, the information itself requires a cognitive observer to be accessed. In terms of communication, information is expressed either as the content of a message or through direct or indirect observation. That, perceived can be construed as a message in its own right, in that sense, information is always conveyed as the content of a message. Information can be encoded into various forms for interpretation, it can be encrypted for safe storage and communication. Information reduces uncertainty; the uncertainty of an event is measured by its probability of occurrence and is inversely proportional to that.
The more uncertain an event, the more information is required to resolve uncertainty of that event. The bit is a typical unit of information. For example, the information encoded in one "fair" coin flip is log2 = 1 bit, in two fair coin flips is log2 = 2 bits; the concept of information has different meanings in different contexts. Thus the concept becomes related to notions of constraint, control, form, knowledge, understanding, mental stimuli, perception and entropy; the English word derives from the Latin stem of the nominative: this noun derives from the verb informare in the sense of "to give form to the mind", "to discipline", "instruct", "teach". Inform itself comes from the Latin verb informare, which means to form an idea of. Furthermore, Latin itself contained the word informatio meaning concept or idea, but the extent to which this may have influenced the development of the word information in English is not clear; the ancient Greek word for form was μορφή and εἶδος "kind, shape, set", the latter word was famously used in a technical philosophical sense by Plato to denote the ideal identity or essence of something.'Eidos' can be associated with thought, proposition, or concept.
The ancient Greek word for information is πληροφορία, which transliterates from πλήρης "fully" and φέρω frequentative of to carry through. It means "bears fully" or "conveys fully". In modern Greek the word Πληροφορία is still in daily use and has the same meaning as the word information in English. In addition to its primary meaning, the word Πληροφορία as a symbol has deep roots in Aristotle's semiotic triangle. In this regard it can be interpreted to communicate information to the one decoding that specific type of sign; this is something that occurs with the etymology of many words in ancient and modern Greek where there is a strong denotative relationship between the signifier, e.g. the word symbol that conveys a specific encoded interpretation, the signified, e.g. a concept whose meaning the interpreter attempts to decode. In English, “information” is an uncountable mass noun. In information theory, information is taken as an ordered sequence of symbols from an alphabet, say an input alphabet χ, an output alphabet ϒ.
Information processing consists of an input-output function that maps any input sequence from χ into an output sequence from ϒ. The mapping may be deterministic, it may be memoryless. Information can be viewed as a type of input to an organism or system. Inputs are of two kinds. In his book Sensory Ecology Dusenbery called these causal inputs. Other inputs are important only because they are associated with causal inputs and can be used to predict the occurrence of a causal input at a time; some information is important because of association with other information but there must be a connection to a causal input. In practice, information is carried by weak stimuli that must be detected by specialized sensory systems and amplified by energy inputs before they can be functional to the organism or system. For example, light is a causal input to plants but for animals it only provides information; the colored light reflected from a flower is too weak to do much photosynthetic work but the visual system of the bee detects it and the bee's nervous system uses the information to guide the bee to the flower, where the bee finds nectar or pollen, which are causal inputs, serving a nutritional function.
The cognitive scientist and applied mathematician Ronaldo Vigo argues that information is a concept that requires at least two related entities to make quantitative sense. These are, any dimensionally defined category of objects S, any of its subsets R. R, in essence, is a representation of S, or, in other words, conveys representational information about S. Vigo defines the amount of information that R conveys a
Table of contents
A table of contents headed Contents and abbreviated informally as TOC, is a list found on a page before the start of a written work, of its chapter or section titles or brief descriptions with their commencing page numbers. Pliny the Elder credits Quintus Valerius Soranus as the first author to provide a table of contents to help readers navigate a lengthy work. Pliny's own table of contents for his encyclopedic Historia naturalis may be viewed online in Latin and in English. A table of contents includes the titles or descriptions of first-level headings, includes second-level headings within the chapters as well, even includes third-level headings within the sections as well; the depth of detail in tables of contents depends on the length of the work, with longer works having less. Formal reports have a table of contents. Within an English-language book, the table of contents appears after the title page, copyright notices, and, in technical journals, the abstract. Printed tables of contents indicate page numbers where each part starts, while digital ones offer links to go to each part.
The format and location of the page numbers is a matter of style for the publisher. If the page numbers appear after the heading text, they might be preceded by characters called leaders dots or periods, that run from the chapter or section titles on the opposite side of the page, or the page numbers might remain closer to the titles. In some cases, the page number appears before the text. If a book or document contains chapters, articles, or stories by different authors, their names appear in the table of contents. Matter preceding the table of contents is not listed there. However, all pages except the outside cover are counted, the table of contents is numbered with a lowercase Roman numeral page number. Many popular word processors, such as Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, StarWriter are capable of automatically generating a table of contents if the author of the text uses specific styles for chapters, subsections, etc. Example with leaders: Chapter 1: Getting Started............. 1 Introduction..................
2 Next Steps................... 3 Example without leaders: Chapter 1: Getting Started 1 Introduction 2 Next Steps 3 Example with authors: 1. Introduction to Biology Arthur C. Smith 1 2. Microbiology Susan Jones 10 3. Advances in Biotechnology T. C. Chang 24 Example with descriptive text: Chapter 1 3 In which we first meet our hero and heroine, attend a gala feast, begin an unexpected journey. Chapter 2 12 The journey takes an unusual turn, new villains are discovered
Body text
The body text or body copy is the text forming the main content of a book, web page, or any other printed or digital work. This is as a contrast to both additional components such as headings, charts, footnotes etc. on each page, the pages of front matter that form the introduction to a book. Body text has two different meanings, depending on context. A book designer, concerned with the overall sequence of a book, regards it as those pages that form the majority of a book, containing the body of text or body matter. A typesetter concerned instead with the layout of text on a page sees'body text' as being those sections of the main text that are flowed into columns or justified as paragraphs, as distinct from the headings and any pictures that are floated out of the main body; the ` body matter' is the group of pages. The front matter comes before it, containing content lists, publisher's metadata etc.. It is followed by the back matter, which includes appendices, credits, colophon etc; the distinction between the parts and other, is that the body matter is produced by the author, the front and back matter by the publisher.
Where there is a prose introduction, it demonstrates this. In some technical publications, appendices are so long and important as part of the book that they are a creative endeavour of the author, rather than a mere collation exercise by the publisher. In this case they may, like the introduction, be considered as a part of the body matter. At one time, books were produced as'letter-books', where the body of text consisted of chapters of solid text, unillustrated. Where illustrations were provided, these were costly and so plates were inserted in sections, either at the end of the body matter, or grouped within the signatures. Development in printing in the early 20th century, developments in newspaper design and the incorporation of photographs, encouraged the development of the'picture-book' where images were mixed in the text and formed part of the body matter itself. Typesetting of the body text is the work of their typesetter. Typesetting of the other parts, the front matter, pages of the body matter involving specific design of their layout are, if budget permits, the remit of the book designer.
Typesetting of the body text is considered to be rote work: skilled, but not inherently creative. Computer typesetting was thus first applied to body text; this represented the bulk of the work, yet that part requiring the least human creative input. Body text is typeset in a serif font, as these are perceived as more readable for text in dense blocks, whilst a sans-serif font is used for the adjacent headings. HTML follows. There is an HTML element named <body> that serves to delimit the body matter from the front matter that contains metadata such as the page title. The typesetting of the web page is carried out by document body elements within this. There is no specific HTML element for'body text' in the typesetting sense; the block elements of <p> and <div> are both used for this, but these elements are used for a great many general markup purposes within HTML and so there is not any semantic implication that they always contain'body'. <p> would be favoured over <div>
Endpaper
The endpapers or end-papers of a book are the pages that consist of a double-size sheet folded, with one half pasted against an inside cover, the other serving as the first free page. Thus, the front endpapers precede the title page and the text, whereas the back endpapers follow the text. Booksellers sometimes refer to the front endpaper as FEP. Before mass printing in the 20th century it was common for the endpapers of books to have paper marbling. Sometimes the endpapers are used for other relevant information, they are the traditional place to put an owner's inscription. As of 2010, there are many styles of endsheets or endpapers that are designed for use with different bindings. For example, endsheets reinforced; the cloth prevents the paper from perforating and tearing. Other styles are designed for use with perfect binders. Combined and Universal Endsheets are loaded into the cover feeder of an automatic perfect binder and attached – instead of the soft cover – automatically producing a book block reinforced from head to tail.
The Folded Tabbed End sheet is collated with the text pages and bound along with the book block. There are many styles of endpapers that are engineered to meet textbook standards and library binding standards as well as endsheets for conservation and book repair. Bookbinding Book design
Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing, letter-spacing, adjusting the space between pairs of letters; the term typography is applied to the style and appearance of the letters and symbols created by the process. Type design is a related craft, sometimes considered part of typography. Typography may be used as a decorative device, unrelated to communication of information. Typography is the work of typesetters, graphic designers, art directors, manga artists, comic book artists, graffiti artists, now, anyone who arranges words, letters and symbols for publication, display, or distribution, from clerical workers and newsletter writers to anyone self-publishing materials; until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of unrelated designers and lay users; as the capability to create typography has become ubiquitous, the application of principles and best practices developed over generations of skilled workers and professionals has diminished.
So at a time when scientific techniques can support the proven traditions through understanding the limitations of human vision, typography as encountered may fail to achieve its principal objective: effective communication. The word "typography" in English comes from the Greek roots τύπος typos = "impression" and -γραφία -graphia = "writing". Although applied to printed, published and reproduced materials in contemporary times, all words, letters and numbers written alongside the earliest naturalistic drawings by humans may be called typography; the word, typography, is derived from the Greek words τύπος typos "form" or "impression" and γράφειν graphein "to write", traces its origins to the first punches and dies used to make seals and currency in ancient times, which ties the concept to printing. The uneven spacing of the impressions on brick stamps found in the Mesopotamian cities of Uruk and Larsa, dating from the second millennium B. C. may be evidence of type, wherein the reuse of identical characters was applied to create cuneiform text.
Babylonian cylinder seals were used to create an impression on a surface by rolling the seal on wet clay. Typography was implemented in the Phaistos Disc, an enigmatic Minoan printed item from Crete, which dates to between 1850 and 1600 B. C, it has been proposed that Roman lead pipe inscriptions were created with movable type printing, but German typographer Herbert Brekle dismissed this view. The essential criterion of type identity was met by medieval print artifacts such as the Latin Pruefening Abbey inscription of 1119, created by the same technique as the Phaistos Disc; the silver altarpiece of patriarch Pellegrinus II in the cathedral of Cividale was printed with individual letter punches. The same printing technique may be found in tenth to twelfth century Byzantine reliquaries. Other early examples include individual letter tiles where the words are formed by assembling single letter tiles in the desired order, which were reasonably widespread in medieval Northern Europe. Typography with movable type was invented during the eleventh-century Song dynasty in China by Bi Sheng.
His movable type system was manufactured from ceramic materials, clay type printing continued to be practiced in China until the Qing Dynasty. Wang Zhen was one of the pioneers of wooden movable type. Although the wooden type was more durable under the mechanical rigors of handling, repeated printing wore the character faces down and the types could be replaced only by carving new pieces. Metal movable type was first invented in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty 1230. Hua Sui introduced bronze type printing to China in 1490 AD; the diffusion of both movable-type systems was limited and the technology did not spread beyond East and Central Asia, however. Modern lead-based movable type, along with the mechanical printing press, is most attributed to the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg in 1439, his type pieces, made from a lead-based alloy, suited printing purposes so well that the alloy is still used today. Gutenberg developed specialized techniques for casting and combining cheap copies of letter punches in the vast quantities required to print multiple copies of texts.
This technical breakthrough was instrumental in starting the Printing Revolution and the first book printed with lead-based movable type was the Gutenberg Bible. Advancing technology revolutionized typography in the latter twentieth century. During the 1960s some camera-ready typesetting could be produced in any office or workshop with stand-alone machines such as those introduced by IBM. During the mid-1980s personal computers such as the Macintosh allowed type designers to create typefaces digitally using commercial graphic design software. Digital technology enabled designers to create more experimental typefaces as well as the practical typefaces of traditional typography. Designs for typefaces could be created faster with the new technology, for more specific functions; the cost for developing typefaces was drastically lowered, becoming available to the masses. The change has been called the "democratization of type" and has given new designers more opportunities to enter the field; the design of typefaces has de
Introduction (writing)
In an essay, article, or book, an introduction is a beginning section which states the purpose and goals of the following writing. This is followed by the body and conclusion; the introduction describes the scope of the document and gives the brief explanation or summary of the document. It may explain certain elements that are important to the essay if explanations are not part of the main text; the readers can have an idea about the following text before they start reading it. Ln technical writing, the introduction includes one or more standard subsections: abstract or summary, preface and foreword. Alternatively, the section labeled introduction itself may be a brief section found side-by-side with abstract, etc.. In this case the set of sections that come before the body of the book are known as the front matter; when the book is divided into numbered chapters, by convention the introduction and any other front-matter sections are unnumbered and precede chapter 1. Keeping the concept of the introduction the same, different documents have different styles to introduce the written text.
For example, the introduction of a Functional Specification consists of information that the whole document is yet to explain. If a Userguide is written, the introduction is about the product. In a report, the introduction gives a summary about the report contents. Dramatic structure Lead paragraph Executive summary Foreword Preamble Preface Prologue Epigraph Leora Freedman. "Introductions and Conclusions". University of Toronto
Epigraph (literature)
In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem, set at the beginning of a document or component. The epigraph may serve as a preface, as a summary, as a counter-example, or to link the work to a wider literary canon, either to invite comparison or to enlist a conventional context. In a book, it is part of the front matter; as the epigraph to The Sum of All Fears, Tom Clancy quotes Winston Churchill in the context of thermonuclear war:Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get? The sum of their fears; the long quotation from Dante's Inferno that prefaces T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is part of a speech by one of the damned in Dante's Hell. Linking it to the monologue which forms Eliot's poem adds a comment and a dimension to Prufrock's confession. * The epigraph to E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime quotes Scott Joplin's instructions to those who play his music, "Do not play this piece fast.
It is never right to play ragtime fast." The epigraph to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is John 12:24. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." The epigraph to Eliot's Gerontion is a quotation from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" uses the line "Mistah Kurtz, he dead" from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as one of its two epigraphs; as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway quotes Gertrude Stein, "You are all a lost generation." The epigraph to Theodore Herzl's'Altneuland' is "If you will it, it is no dream..." which became a slogan of the Zionist movement. A Samuel Johnson quote is used as an epigraph in Hunter S. Thompson's novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." Stephen King uses many epigraphs in his writing to mark the beginning of another section in a novel. An unusual example is The Stand wherein he uses lyrics from certain songs to express the metaphor used in a particular part.
Jack London uses the first stanza of John Myers O'Hara's poem "Atavism" as the epigraph to The Call of the Wild. The epigraphs to the preamble of Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual and to the book as a whole warn the reader that tricks are going to be played and that all will not be what it seems. J. K. Rowling's novels begin with epigraphs relating to the themes explored. For example, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows features a quotation from Aeschylus' tragedy, The Libation Bearers; some writers use as epigraphs fictional quotations that purport to be related to the fiction of the work itself. Examples include: The film Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby opens with a fictional quotation attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt for comedic effect; some science fiction works, such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, Frank Herbert's Dune series, Jack McKinney's the Robotech novelizations use quotations from an imagined future history of the period of their story. Fantasy literature may include epigraphs.
For example, Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series includes epigraphs quoted from the epic poetry of the Earthsea archipelago; the first and last books of Diane Duane's Rihannsu series of Star Trek novels pair quotations from Lays of Ancient Rome with imagined epigraphs from Romulan literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby opens with a poem entitled "Then Wear the Gold Hat," purportedly written by Thomas Parke D'Invilliers. D'Invilliers is a character in This Side of Paradise; this cliché is parodied by Diana Wynne Jones in The Tough Guide To Fantasyland. Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair has quotations from future works about the action of the story. John Green's The Fault in Our Stars has a quotation from a fictitious novel, An Imperial Affliction, which features prominently as a part of the story. Stephen King's The Dark Half has epigraphs taken from the fictitious novels written by the protagonist. Dean Koontz's The Book of Counted Sorrows began as a fictional book of poetry from which Koontz would "quote" when no suitable existing option was available.
Many fans, rather than realizing the work was Koontz' own invention believed it was a real, but rare, volume. A poem at the beginning of J. R. R. Tolkien' The Lord of the Rings describes the Rings of Power, the central plot device of the novel. Epigram, a brief, interesting and sometimes surprising or satirical statement Incipit, the first few words of a text, employed as an identifying label Flavor text, applied to games and toys Prologue, an opening to a story that establishes context and may give background Keynote, the first non-specific talk on a conference spoken by an invited speaker in order to sum up the main theme of the conference. Barth, John; the Friday Book. Pp. xvii–xviii. Epigraphic: an ever-growing, searchable collection of literary epigraphs Epigraph at Literary Devices
